It is sometimes necessary or otherwise desirable to treat bodily passages using a balloon catheter. For example, when sinus cavities become blocked, balloon sinuplasty, the dilation of the sinus using a balloon catheter, provides an alternative to radical surgical approaches to unblocking the sinus.
Conventional sinuplasty procedures place a balloon catheter over a previously placed wireguide and are complicated by the need to use x-ray or other visualization equipment to verify positioning of the balloon and wireguide in the proper sinus cavity prior to the actual dilation procedure. Lighted wireguides have been developed to facilitate the visualization process, but still present significant drawbacks. For example, lighted wireguides cannot be torqued because they typically include a coil that extends the entire length of the wireguide and lack a rigid inner member. As a result, these devices are not steerable, which limits the ability of a user to navigate the device towards a point of treatment.
In addition, with respect to treating an airway, such as the trachea, a user generally advances a balloon catheter freely towards a point of treatment beyond the vocal chords. These devices do not allow a user to steer the distal end of the catheter through the anatomy of a patient. Therefore, to complete treatment, a user continuously advances and withdraws the distal end of the catheter from a portion of the airway to navigate past the vocal chords. As a result, the complexity and the length of time the procedure takes to complete are increased.
Therefore, a need exists for steerable guide members and catheters assemblies that include such guide members.